lq_x_pl writes: After failing to effectively capitalize on Slashdot's user base, Dice Holdings is deciding to sell off Slashdot and Sourceforge. Dice also announced that they would be selling off Sourceforge. The change of ownership is likely welcome, as Dice has been much-maligned by Slashdot's regulars.Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: In their own words DHI Group, formerly known as DICE Holdings, has "not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business." As a result, DHI plans to sell off both Slashdot and Sourceforge, the latter of which has become notorious for inserting malware into the installers of popular open-source projects such as GIMP. All of this is likely to make the Slashdot editor's censoring of the Sourceforge scandal on DICE's behalf pointless to say the least, but the question remains; what is the future of Slashdot, without DHI Group?Link to Original Source

Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday January 28, 2015 @02:52PM
from the rest-in-peace dept.

An anonymous reader writes Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died early Tuesday in Oakland. He was 99. "Charlie was a cornerstone of the Space Sciences Laboratory for almost 50 years,” said Stuart Bale, director of the lab and a UC Berkeley professor of physics. “He trained a great number of excellent students in experimental astrophysics and pioneered a program to develop interferometry at short wavelengths. He was a truly inspiring man and a nice guy. We’ll miss him.”

So let's say you do go to the bother of setting up a nice GPG system between yourself and third parties and you're happily transmitting your alphanumeric gobbledeygook to your mail server via STARTTLS......along comes Verizon or whomever. They strip out the TLS negotiation and now your mail client is authenticating to your mail server in plaintext. Any MITM attacker will then sniff your credentials and start playing funny games with your mail. Blackholing your GPG encrypted mails? Randomising each sig block it sees every time? Replacing signature.asc on all of the mails with their own? Sending fake messages saying "I can't get this stupid encryption thing to work, can we just talk normally please?!"? Worse still is that Alice and Bob will now have a false sense of security whilst Charlie laughs all the way to the Nigerian Bank/NSA/HMRC/GEFAFWISP. GPG in the context where a MITM is blatantly trying to undermine the authentication process is a bit like putting a secure padlock on a paper bag.

In short: just encrypting your mail at the source isn't really a solution to what is a blatant MITM attack. Hopefully server and client software will start mandating TLS instead of STARTTLS very soon... wish it had been the default for years.

I don't know if I'm alone here but I've been hot-plugging CPUs, RAM and even, shock horror, keyboards and mice on linux now for at least five years without having to use systemd to do it. Linux has had awesome hotplug support for years, even in the bad ol' days of static devfs.

Not trying to denigrate the GP - I suspect they've just never had to deal with a server environment that changed much. But rest assured linux has been capable of dealing with radical changes in hardware for at least five years, and changes to peripherals (disc, network, keyboards, USB, blah) for at least a decade. That people think this sort of thing is only possible with systemd is all just mirrors and wires.

This was already shown back on Charlie Brooker's TV Go Home over a decade ago. No link sadly as it's flagged as "obscene" by the company filter...

TETRIS

A Dark Thriller starring Nick Berry.

Professor Jack Warburton discovers the source of the tumbling fun to be a shadowy government bureau, and uncovers the alarming scientific method by which complete rows of blocks mysteriously "disappear".

Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday September 29, 2014 @02:35PM
from the new-rules dept.

schwit1 writes Google is looking to exert more pressure on device OEMs that wish to continue using the Android mobile operating system. Among the new requirements for many partners: increasing the number of Google apps that must be pre-installed on the device to as many as 20, placing more Google apps on the home screen or in a prominent icon folder and making Google Search more prominent. Earlier this year, Google laid its vision to reduce fragmentation by forcing OEMs to ship new devices with more recent version of Android. Those OEMs that choose not to comply lose access to Google Mobile Services (GMS) apps like Gmail, Google Play, and YouTube.

Be careful what you wish for; I'm sure the ISPs would love to be able to collect tithes from users and redistribute them to all of the eligible sites that you visit. And then plaster you with ads anyway.